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Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings will perform with James Hunter on April 5 at the Commodore Ballroom

Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings

With James Hunter

April 5, 8:30 p.m. | Commodore Ballroom

Tickets: Sold out

Sharon Jones will always have a special place in her heart for Michael Bublé and for recruiting her to sing on his 2009 album Crazy Love.

“Thank God for Michael Bublé,” Jones exclaimed over the phone from Phoenix, Ariz. “That was the down payment on my house to get my mom out of the projects. Even though she only lived a year. Less than a year. We moved in April and she died in March of the following year.”

The duet, Baby (You’ve Got What It Takes), originally recorded by Dinah Washington and Brook Benton, even landed Sharon Jones and her Brooklyn-based soul revival band The Dap-Kings on stage alongside Bublé on Saturday Night Live in January 2010.

“That was nice of him to have me on Saturday Night Live,” Jones said. “He didn’t have to do that. He could have chosen any song and that’s what gave me exposure on Saturday Night Live.”

Life hasn’t been easy on Sharon Jones.

Toiling in obscurity for years, it wasn’t until the mid-2000s that Jones, now 57 (she turns 58 in May), found a certain amount of exposure.

Thanks to a sound that hearkened back to the good old days of Otis Redding, her 2005 album Naturally gave Jones, her band, and her budding label Daptone a big push.

The next few years brought out more critically acclaimed and infectiously funky work: 100 Days, 100 Nights (2007), I Learned The Hard Way (2010) and this year’s Give The People What They Want.

But Jones may have not been able to easily grace the stage following a disastrous 2013, a year in which she was diagnosed with and fought a battle against pancreatic cancer.

Jones went through her last chemotherapy treatment on New Year’s Eve, was declared cancer-free, and hasn’t looked back since, save for a quick checkup here and there to make sure none of those pesky cancerous cells return.

Her hair is slowly growing back and she is regaining her strength (the brisket she was having for lunch at the time of the interview seemed particularly fortifying).

And if she admitted some performances are difficult to get through and she has to spend part of them on a stool rather than shimmying and shaking her butt off, Jones will keep on living by the title of her last album: giving the people what they want.

“That’s my goal — that’s soul music,” she said. “I think the reason why God brought me back out here is because I want to prove to these people out there that soul music is not dead. Soul music did not end in ’69. It’s still here today and we don’t want it to end.”

Certain songs from Give The People What They Want have taken on a new meaning after her battle with cancer.

Album opener Retreat and the love-gone-wrong rump buster Get Up And Get Out (written by Dap-King Homer Steinweiss) have somewhat become Jones’ personal cancer-fighting tunes, taking on a new meaning after the fact.

“I couldn’t sing (Get Up And Get Out) because I didn’t understand it,” Jones said. “Homer wouldn’t tell me what the song was about. That was one of the last songs I learned.

“The second verse is: ‘All my friends they ask me about you/I swear up and down that we are through/If only what I said was true/Why can’t you find someone new?/Get up and get out.’ Like, what the hell? I couldn’t figure out the story. So Homer said, ‘OK, well, this song was about bedbugs.’”

She laughed, adding that she usually introduces the song doing her best Tina Turner impression.

Much like her contemporaries Lee Fields, with whom she sang with her pre-Dap-Kings band The Soul Providers in the ’90s, and Charles Bradley, who sings on Daptone sub-division Dunham Records, Jones is a true survivor.

Before finding the spotlight, Jones cut her teeth doing session work, working as a corrections officer at Rikers Island and as an armoured car guard for Wells Fargo Bank in New York City.

“Working with the men in corrections was hard,” Jones said. “Other than that it was good.

Jones is a tough lady, but bouncing back from cancer can take its toll on a touring artist, even one looking forward to a sold out concert in front of her fans at the Commodore Ballroom in Vancouver.

“It’s been a very tough ride, thinking a few months ago that I may not be here,” she said. “For a little while I thought the album was going to come out and people would be buying it but I would never be able to perform it.”

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